Published
Weekend Reading — 🕺 Same panic different disco
This week we boot from a vinyl record, read a tribute to FrontPage, scoop some coffee in, pour some water, and eat some Brussels Sprouts.
Taylor Hatmaker “who did this”
🪑 Design Objective
“Yes or No?” — One Checkbox vs Two Radio Buttons. Age old question. Two ways to ask a yes/no question, but depending on the context, you'll get different results:
It also depends on how the question is phrased. Radio buttons are the obvious choice if the label is a question. Checkboxes are more suitable if the label is a statement (and assuming it is an opt-in field).
Your first attempt at making anything accessible will be awful This:
98 % of websites are completely inaccessible. You couldn’t possibly do any worse than they are. The starting point is giving a damn.
🧰 Tools of the Trade
DevTerm I don’t need one, but damn do I want one!
DevTerm is a post-modern, digital minimalist lifestyle.
The A5 notebook size integrates complete PC functions with a retro-futurism design, a 6.8-inch ultra-wide screen, classic QWERTY keyboard, necessary interfaces, high-speed wireless, long battery life, and even includes a practical thermal printer.
alyssaxuu/screenity “Screenity is a feature-packed screen and camera recorder for Chrome. Annotate your screen to give feedback, emphasize your clicks, edit your recording, and much more.”
Lambda Store is a Redis database with utility pricing: $0.4 for 100K commands, $0.15 for 1GB storage. Add a database, don't worry about idle time, scale as you need.
Built to Last Don’t blame COBOL. Blame austerity.
Although New Jersey’s governor issued his desperate plea for COBOL programmers, later investigations revealed that it was the website through which people filed claims, written in the comparatively much newer programming language Java, that was responsible for the errors, breakdowns, and slowdowns. The backend system that processed those claims—the one written in COBOL—hadn’t been to blame at all.
Comparing iPhone OS 1.0 with iOS 14 using tree maps You can get a sense of the most important features, based on how much space they take up. When Steve Jobs announced iOS 1.0 back in 2007, 25% of the operating system was fonts (not surprising). iOS 14 has more fonts, but they take only 6% of the entire OS space. Big chunks reserved for machine learning, linguistic data, and video/photo processing.
who called them "spot instances" and not "EC2 Stories"
Booting from a vinyl record If you can, why not? Booting a PC from a record player. Turns out the original DOS, all 64KB of it, fits on a 10" record: total playing time 06:10 at 45 rpm.
🕸️ Web-end
Mark Dalgleish “Calling it now. Once we have 'leading-trim' in CSS, it'll be the new 'box-sizing: border-box' — something everyone manually applies to every element on every site, leaving us to wonder why it wasn't the default from the beginning. https://medium.com/microsoft-design/leading-trim-the-future-of-digital-typesetting-d082d84b202”
bfcache Back/forward cache: instant loads when using the browser's back and forward buttons.
Prevent layout shifts with CSS grid stacks Cool trick and much easier than layering elements with absolute positioning:
In other words: this very area will always be as big as the biggest between
.chartand.info. Therefore, the height of the whole component will be the same when toggling between states.
BrendanEich “Always bet on JS.”
Robᵉʳᵗ Graham😷, provocateur: 9/ Apple has made surprising choices. They've optimized JavaScript, with special JavaScript-specific instructions, double sized L1 caches, and probably other tricks I don't know of.
FrontPage: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly Remember Microsoft FrontPage?
So, somehow, they managed to hire many professional coders for no salary whatsoever to work on FrontPage. (Early start-up culture, perhaps?) Evidently it worked, as FrontPage was released (only!) a week behind schedule on October of 1995. By then the World Wide Web was exploding, with a 20% increase in sites per month. FrontPage also managed to explode, receiving many awards and positive reviews. In fact, it was so good that Microsoft ended up buying them out. According to them, not only did it feel like a native Office application, it was perfect for their ongoing plan to become more internet centric.
📓 Lines of Code
Richard Campbell “Debugging Tactics...”
Kristen Seversky “🤣😂😭💀⚰️”
📈 Business Side
Shreyas Doshi “If you’re a Startup trying to compete with a Megacorp—the 800-pound Gorilla in the space—you need to understand the tax inherent to being a Gorilla
And then you need to make that tax work against the Gorilla—with your product's positioning & features
A thread on Gorilla taxes👇🏾”
Emil Stenström “Business school, summarized in one video:”
🏠 WFH
Americans Got Tired of Looking Bad on Zoom The pandemic’s at-home workers are discovering what internet influencers have long known: If you want to be taken seriously, get good lighting!
Edward-Isaac Dovere “Walter Cronkite reports on working from quarantine”
🤖 Machine Inelligence
The New York Times “For now, there are ways to detect some common flaws in the people that AI conjures up: earrings that don’t match, a lack of symmetry, or eyeglasses with mismatched end pieces.”
⭐ None of the Above
Theories abound over mystery metal monolith found in Utah 2001: A Space Odyssey structure shows up in the desert and nobody knows where it came from.
Anastasia Golovashkina: Has anyone come up with a good answer to "how are you?"
I have not.
Sean Kelly: "Oh, you know, same panic different disco."
Tinker 😆
The Mandalorian is about a single father in a gig economy trying to survive and take care of his child.
All while wearing an outward mask that conceals his emotions from his child, his colleagues, and the world.
...Also his car keeps breaking down.
Dieter Bohn “Coffee people: 18.42 grams finely ground coffee, water at 94.2 degrees, bloom 30.4 seconds, stir counterclockwise 2.5 times...
Literal inventor of AeroPress: Scoop some coffee in. Pour some water. Press. Microwave with milk after yolo it's a latte now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c14DxfVOY4”
mikey chickenjoy “Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.”
I... can't vacuum... because us-east-1 is down.
James Hamblin “Outdoor dining has gradually escalated into what might reasonably be called a buildings.”
Nathanael May I grew up hating them, and not many years ago decided they’re delicious, and this thread explains it all:
Brussels Sprouts Were Actually Bad: A Thread
When I was a kid, Brussels Sprouts were the go-to joke food when people talked about things they hated to eat.
1/
I couldn’t just walk past this Tweet, so here is some fun #dataviz
Scented candles: An unexpected victim of the COVID-19 pandemic 1/n
You eat sausages your whole life but you refuse vaccine because you don’t know what’s in it.
Maintaining ✨ “I told my daughter to grab her mask so we can go to the store. This was the mask she grabbed.”
